The Hunt: a film about a society in thrall to its children

Thomas Vinterberg’s first feature to be released internationally, Festen (1998), was also the first product of the mischievous “Dogme 95” manifesto. This vow of artistic chastity was cooked up by Vinterberg, Lars von Trier and other Danish film-makers who sought to strip cinema of such unconscionably decadent elements as artificial lighting, dubbed sound and tripods. “Dogme 95” may be dead but The Hunt brings Vinterberg back full circle to Festen, thematically if not stylistically. Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s camerawork, though handheld, is elegant, while the film is crisply beautiful, with blazing autumnal colours giving way in the second half to arctic hues. Even music is permitted: the film begins with a group of hunting buddies leaping into a lake to the sound of Van Morrison’s “Moondance”. Given what follows, “Bad Moon Rising” might have been a better choice.

Where Festen concerned a patriarch exposed as a child abuser, The Hunt is set in motion when the same accusation is levelled against an innocent kindergarten teacher. To British eyes generally unaccustomed to seeing male staff at nursery schools, there may already be something odd about Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) playfighting with toddlers on the scatter cushions. Cultural norms aside, though, he is a model of propriety, which is partly his undoing. Rejecting a gift and a kiss from one of his doting young wards, Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), he provokes the child’s wrath. She makes a mumbled, fictitious complaint about him to the headteacher, who takes her at her word. Lucas is cast out and branded a monster, or, in current parlance, thoroughly McAlpined.

I worried at this point that the psychological implausibility of Klara’s behaviour would capsize the film. Even the coincidence of having been shown a pornographic image by her older brother doesn’t explain her calculated strike on Lucas. Young children can be spiteful, though rarely in the same ways as their elders. This poppet operates briefly on a sophisticated plane of vindictiveness worthy of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

Vinterberg’s depiction of the panic provoked by the scandal is robust enough to override this narrative bump. The Hunt is a commendably cool study of hysteria, with a taut performance by Mikkelsen that recalls Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man. It helps that the indictment of the small-town Danish community precedes Lucas’s woes. The children’s playful ritual of spying on him as he strolls to work, hiding in bushes to ambush him, foreshadows the attacks that will be carried out by their adult relatives. The film plants the suggestion that mob rule is latent in even the gentlest communities. It’s there in the playground. All it needs is a nudge.

The hunting party to which Lucas belongs provides the film with both a motif and a sense of circularity (his teenage son is waiting to be inducted into this masculine tradition). But the threat is not exclusively male: the whispering women who convene at the kindergarten are every bit as dangerous as the rifle-toting men. Regardless of gender, they all revere Klara’s word. When she tries to recant, they urge her to cling to her complaint: “It did happen,” her mother tells her. (Other lines include: “I believe in the children” and “My little girl doesn’t lie”.)

This is a film about a society in thrall to its children, a Midwich Cuckoos for the Savile era. As long as someone out there is demonised as a defiler of innocence, the attention is deflected from our own failings, minor or otherwise. Near the start of the film, Klara’s parents are arguing so furiously that Lucas has to step in and take her to school for them. Their neglect is a form of child abuse too. The suggestion of a larger crime against their daughter is for them as much smokescreen as nightmare.

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.

Commons Confidential: Money for old Gove

Treachery is proving profitable for Michael Gove since his backstabbing of Boris Johnson led to the victim being named Foreign Sec and the knifeman carved out of Theresa May’s cabinet. The former injustice secretary was overheard giving it the big “I am” in the Lords café bar by my snout and boasting that he’ll trouser £300,000 on the political sidelines. I note a £150,000 Times column and £17,500 HarperCollins book deal have been duly registered. Speaking engagements, he confided to the Tory peer Simone Finn, will be equally lucrative.

Gove is polite (always says hello and smiles at me despite what I write) but it was insensitive to talk money when his companion was moaning. Finn, a Cameron crony, whined that she had been sacked as a spad and so is out of pocket. Perhaps he could lend her a tenner. And I do hope Mickey isn’t passing himself off as an “expert” to coin it.

While Nigel Farage’s successor-but-one Paul “Dr Nutty” Nuttall protests that he never doctored a CV with an invented university PhD, Ukip’s ritzy nonpareil continues to enjoy the high life. My informant spied Farage, the self-appointed people’s chief revolter, relaxing in first class on a British Airways flight from New York to Blighty. Drinking three types of champagne doesn’t come cheap at £8,000 one-way, so either the Brexit elitist is earning big bucks or he has found a sugar daddy. Nowt’s too good for the Quitters, eh?

Labour’s youngest MP, Lou Haigh, was popular in a Justice for Colombia delegation to monitor the Northern Ireland-inspired peace process there. At Normandia prison in Chiquinquira, after a five-hour drive to see Farc guerrillas cleared for release, inmates pushed past the British male trade unionists to greet the 29-year-old Sheffield Heeley tribune. What a change from parliament, where it is women who are treated as if they’re wearing Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks.

The kowtowing is catching up with Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, the SNP party animal and onetime-Tory-turned-Labour. Better late than never, I hear, she delivered a masterclass in toadying to the Chinese at a Ditchley Park conflab. Ahmed-Grovel MP avoided discussion of human rights abuses and made much instead of the joys of Scotch whisky to Beijing, and Scotland as a gateway to the UK. I trust she kept her sycophancy secret from SNP colleagues jostling in parliament a short while back for photographs with Lobsang Sangay, head of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

John Bercow is concerned that private schools dominate visits to parliament. So a bit like the Commons chamber, where 32 per cent of MPs (48 per cent of Tories) come from establishments that teach 7 per cent of pupils in the UK.

Kevin Maguire is Associate Editor (Politics) on the Daily Mirror and author of our Commons Confidential column on the high politics and low life in Westminster. An award-winning journalist, he is in frequent demand on television and radio and co-authored a book on great parliamentary scandals. He was formerly Chief Reporter on the Guardian and Labour Correspondent on the Daily Telegraph.